An exchange with Senator George Mitchell, President Obama's former Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, about "Israel & the US: The Delusions of Our Diplomacy," my piece in the October 9, 2014 issue of The New York Review of Books.

For a moment in early June, it seemed to many Palestinians that their political leadership was on the verge of making a historic shift. On June 2, seven years of political division—between the unelected government in the West Bank dominated by Fatah, and the elected government in Gaza controlled by the Islamist party Hamas—formally came to an end.

In 1978 a young American citizen then going under the Anglicized name Ben Nitay argued that Palestinians do not have a right to a state, that they could instead get citizenship in Jordan or Israel, and that their goal is not to build a state but to destroy one.